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XML Turns 5

Posted by Hemos on from the changing-times dept.

GiMP writes "According to the World Wide Web Consortium, XML turns 5 years old today. XML is used by many programs as a generic container for data. Applications range from websites, to word processor documents, to video games. It seems like only yesterday it was only a working-draft."

3 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Still a toddler... by pmz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This article is just another reminder how young XML and its associated standards are. No wonder most people are confused about it.

    Whenever I look at the last ten to fifteen years of computing history, I am utterly amazed. Think about this: during the Gulf War, with all its high-tech-ness, the best PCs were 386s or low-end 486s, and the best Sun workstations were the lower-end SPARCstations (i.e., perhaps a 40MHz CPU, probably 30MHz).

    Whenever I see people who are totally overwhelmed by the almost unbounded number of buzzwords, platforms, and dozens of ways to accomplish the same task, I try to remember that nearly everything we take for granted today was popularized in the last decade (often just in the last five years, like XML). There is a quote in the Solaris Internals book that says there were 3000 UNIX systems in 1982 (or 83). There are several orders of magnitude more systems today. No other time in human history have we had to cope with this sort of change in so short a time.

    --
    Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
  2. Re:well then by KDan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Depends what you define as "data". You couldn't exchange stories with them without speaking their language (XML dialects (eg an XML dtd that is structured like a language to allow you to tell stories with only tags) count as a language too, of course. If you can't exchange stories with it, it's not much to fuss about - you're missing out on 99.9% of human knowledge and communication.

    Daniel

    --
    Carpe Diem
  3. Compact or SUV by jefu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Hopefully a more compact form."

    And here, all this time I thought bigger was better.

    In any case, this point always comes up. "XML is too verbose." But a certain amount of verbosity in programming is good (vis Python vs APL) though too much is bad (Cobol vs Java).

    So is XML too verbose?

    Given the right tools we could easily transform "<quote><text><sentence type="question" language="english">" reversably (thats important) to "<q><t><s t="q" l="e">" which certainly is less verbose. I'd be willing to bet that most XML DTDs/Schema would allow for most tags to be reduced to one or two alphabetic characters (that would be 700+ different elements). If thats too much you could build a simple tool defaulting the attributes, eliding the close "</...>" bits quoting unquoted attributes and so on. Which could give us "<q><t><s t=q>". Too verbose still? I could easily go a few steps further but won't.

    In any case, the challenge for those who find XML verbose is to find an isomorphic representation. That is a representation R and transformations XR taking XML to the other representation and RX going the other way so that XR(RX(text)) = text that is less verbose. Lots of people will thank you I expect.